Note to Editors: Reporters and photographers are welcome to attend the
conference free of charge. For more information call Uriel Nauenberg at
+303-492-7715

World’s Particle Physicists to Address Scientific Revolution at Snowmass,
Colorado Workshop, August 14-27 Batavia, Ill.—Nothing less than an
approaching revolution in the understanding of the most basic physical laws
governing the universe will bring some 600 physicists and engineers to an
intensive two-week workshop in Snowmass, Colorado, USA August 14-27. At the
“2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detectors Workshop and the
Second ILC Accelerator Workshop,” scientists from Asia, Europe and North America
will collaborate on the science and technology of a proposed next-generation
particle accelerator. The International Linear Collider would have the potential
to address such fundamental scientific issues as the origin of mass, the nature
of dark matter and dark energy, the existence of extra dimensions, and the
joining of nature’s disparate forces into a single unified force.

The global particle physics community has proposed to design and build a new
particle accelerator, the International Linear Collider, as a means to address
key unanswered questions about the universe. The proposed ILC and the Large
Hadron Collider, an accelerator now under construction at CERN, the European
Center for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland, would create particle
collisions at Tera-electron-volt energies, beyond the reach of today’s
accelerators. Working in concert with the LHC, experiments at the ILC would
allow physicists to explore a region of ultrahigh energies where they expect to
observe phenomena that will answer many of their most profound questions.

At Snowmass, physicists will work on issues, from the cost of civil
construction to the design of accelerating structures and particle detectors,
that must be resolved in order to determine whether and when the proposed ILC
could become a reality.

“Discoveries at the next generation of particle accelerators will
fundamentally change our current picture of the universe,” said physicist Barry
Barish, director of the Global Design Effort (GDE) for the ILC. “The Snowmass
workshop will focus the combined efforts of hundreds of scientists from around
the world on all aspects of the proposed ILC. It will be a key step in
forging the worldwide effort to design a machine that will address the greatest
mysteries of the universe at a cost the world can afford.”

The ILC would consist of two linear accelerators, each approximately 20
kilometers long, hurling beams of electrons and their antimatter twins,
positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light. From its inception,
the ILC would be designed, funded, managed and operated as an international
scientific project.

A major goal of the workshop is to establish the global framework for
developing the accelerator and detector designs for the proposed new linear
collider.

"International participants are the most prominent asset of this Snowmass
workshop," said physicist Fumihiko Takasaki, the GDE’s Asian regional
director. "After a successful workshop at KEK Laboratory in Japan in
November, we have seen the growth of global working groups that are tackling and
solving the enormously technically challenging questions of a realistic design
for the linear collider."

Work will also proceed on the design of advanced detectors for experiments
that physicists hope to carry out at the proposed collider, said University of
Oregon physicist Jim Brau.

"During the Snowmass workshop, the global community of particle physicists
that is designing the experiments for the ILC expect to make significant
advances in understanding how to get the most physics from every experiment,”
Brau said. “The challenges for detector technology at the ILC are great, and we
are designing and testing concepts that go far beyond the capabilities of
current experiments.”

The upcoming workshop will give scientists from around the world the rare
opportunity to meet face to face.

“The Snowmass meeting will strengthen the world-wide collaboration that will
be essential for the ILC,” said British physicist Brian Foster, the GDE’s
European regional director “It will also bring together the accelerator builders
with those primarily involved in detector design for experiments at the ILC. We
are all looking forward to two weeks of intensive and exciting work and
interaction at Snowmass."

The global ILC community plans to complete a “baseline definition” for the
design of the proposed accelerator by the end of 2005, said Cornell University
physicist Gerald Dugan, the GDE’s Americas regional director.

“At Snowmass, we will pull together the results of ongoing design efforts
and technology R&D carried out around the world over the past year,”
Dugan said. “We will take a major step forward toward defining the baseline
design of the ILC and its supporting R&D program.”

Organized by the American Linear Collider Physics Group with the cooperation
of the World Wide Study of Physics and Detectors at the ILC, the Snowmass
workshop is co-chaired by physicists Ed Berger of Argonne National Laboratory
and Uriel Nauenberg of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“Along with the great strides made on the ILC accelerator technology and the
ILC particle detector concepts, in the past year we have substantially
strengthened and clarified our understanding of the physics that the ILC will
address,” Berger said. “We understand better how the ILC would establish the
nature of the Higgs particle, believed to be responsible for particle mass.
Among other topics at Snowmass, we will discuss the search for evidence of
supersymmetry and extra dimensions.”

By the end of the two-week workshop, scientists hope to be another step
closer to building the new accelerator that they believe will work in concert
with CERN’s LHC to reveal many of the universe’s best-kept secrets.

"We expect to discover new phenomena," Nauenberg said. "At the
unprecedented energies of the LHC and ILC we may find the explanation of dark
matter, discover unknown dimensions of space-time, or reveal something
completely unexpected.”

Funding for the Snowmass workshop comes from funding agencies and ministries
including the U.S. Department of Energy; the National Science Foundation; the
Commission of the European Communities; the UK’s Particle Physics and Astronomy
Research Council; Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; France’s
Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules; Germany’s
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; as well as from individual US
national laboratories and universities.